As an alternative to the overhead of asking a senior SRE to carefully plan a specific type of breakage that the new SRE(s) must repair, you can also work in the opposite direction with an exercise that may also increase participation from the entire team: work from a known good configuration and slowly impair the stack at selected bottlenecks, observing upstream and downstream efforts through your monitoring. This exercise is valued by the Google Search SRE team, whose version of this exercise is called “Let’s burn a search cluster to the ground!”
